And you were never to reveal that he had made
you the offer at such a ruinous price, for it was only out of friendship
for you that he was willing to make the sacrifice. Then he would fish a
piece of rock out of his pocket, and after looking mysteriously around as
if he feared he might be waylaid and robbed if caught with such wealth in
his possession, he would dab the rock against his tongue, clap an
eyeglass to it, and exclaim:
"Look at that! Right there in that red dirt! See it? See the specks of
gold? And the streak of silver? That's from the Uncle Abe. There's a
hundred thousand tons like that in sight! Right in sight, mind you!
And when we get down on it and the ledge comes in solid, it will be the
richest thing in the world! Look at the assay! I don't want you to
believe me--look at the assay!"
Then he would get out a greasy sheet of paper which showed that the
portion of rock assayed had given evidence of containing silver and gold
in the proportion of so many hundreds or thousands of dollars to the ton.
I little knew, then, that the custom was to hunt out the richest piece of
rock and get it assayed! Very often, that piece, the size of a filbert,
was the only fragment in a ton that had a particle of metal in it--and
yet the assay made it pretend to represent the average value of the ton
of rubbish it came from!
On such a system of assaying as that, the Humboldt world had gone crazy.
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